Local Luminary Tricia Haggerty-Wenz

Leading Lights of the Community

by Brian K. Mahoney, January 24, 2008

“Do you mind taking the stairs? Elevators are too slow for me,” asks Tricia Haggerty-Wenz, executive director of Safe Harbors on the Hudson. A compact dynamo, she is leading me on a tour of the Cornerstone Residence, a building at the intersection of Broadway and Liberty Street in Newburgh with 116 units of supportive housing, 12 artist’s lofts, a professional gallery space (the Ann Street Gallery), and various amenities not often associated with affordable housing: a computer lab, a laundry room, a library. The building is spotless—Haggerty-Wenz will bend down to pick up scraps of paper from the floor throughout my tour—and scrupulous attention has been paid to the smallest details, from the tasteful furniture and art in the lobby to the paint job, which uses various warm shades of colors that are non-traditional for an “institution.” As we walk through the residence, Haggerty-Wenz greets every tenant by name, inquiring after a family member or asking if they’ll be attending a computer class later that day.

Haggerty-Wenz formed Safe Harbors in 2000 and bought the 13,000-square-foot Hotel Newburgh in 2002 with a $3.1 million grant from the New York State Office of Temporary Disability and Assistance, a homeless housing assistance program. The complete gutting and rehabilitation of the dilapidated welfare hotel—where 88 people were living in squalor and drug dealers and prostitutes transacted business in the hallways—took two years, and cost $21 million, the second largest construction project in Newburgh’s history. Construction was completed in September 2006.

Haggerty-Wenz cites a project her former sister-in-law, Roseanne Haggerty, spearheaded in Time Square in 1991 as inspiration. (Haggerty-Wenz and her then husband served as manual labor.) Haggerty’s organization, Common Ground, bought a fleabag hotel on 44th Street and rebuilt it into an attractive affordable housing residence that eventually drew retail clients like Ben and Jerry’s and Starbucks, and was in the vanguard of Times Square’s transformation.

Safe Harbors, whose offices are housed in the Cornerstone Residence, has 25 full-time employees, most of whom directly serve the needs of tenants, from job counseling to conducting GED classes in the building’s computer lab. Haggerty-Wenz’s next project is restoring the vacant 800-seat Ritz Theater, adjacent to the Cornerstone Residence and owned by Safe Harbors, to its former glory. (Lucille Ball made her stage debut there in 1941.) All Haggerty-Wenz needs to do is raise $10 million for the rehabilitation.

“I know I can do it,” she says. Given what Haggerty-Wenz has accomplished thus far, the project’s success seems assured.

A fundraising concert by singer Levi Kreiss to benefit the restoration of the Ritz Theater will be held on February 23 at 7pm in the lobby of the theater.
For tickets: (845) 562-6940; www.ticketweb.com